NGC3372 The Carina Nebula LRGB (T12: SSO, Australia)

This is the first time I’ve ever used Luminance rather than just straight RGB. Having seen the light after researching it for a while, I followed a fantastic tutorial on the PixInsight website from Vicent Peris here.

I learned quite a lot of new tricks in PixInsight in this tutorial: Colour Calibration, Background Neutralisation, L+RGB Combination, improvements to my DBE process and using the Screen Transfer Function to apply automatic stretches. I might just have to revisit the past few versions of these and update them.

Deep Sky Stacker picked up an incredible 38,774 stars in each of the Luminance Frames. This is such a dense part of the Milky Way it made it hard to distinguish sky gradients from dark dust and changes in star density. Overall I’m pretty happy, I thought it came out very pink, but looking at other images it seems to be the natural colour of the nebula. I’m starting to see blooming sneaking into the brighter stars on the STL-11000M, so will need to work on bloom removal if I want to image something brighter or do longer subs.